Sunday, March 18, 2012

The North Should Save Itself (2)

IT is always convenient to ignore the fact that the North cannot honestly expect to continue in the age-long tradition of living off the sweat of others as it has been doing since oil was discovered in Nigeria.

It is like one's father living off others and later the son does the same, as the chairman of the Petroleum Revenue Task Force, Nuhu Ribadu, seems to be doing. When groundnut and cotton held sway as income earners for the country, no non-producing region, as they were then called, grumbled that their northern counterparts were smiling all the way to the bank with their derivation revenue.

No non-producer of cotton and groundnut envied the producing regions in their merited moments of well-deserved affluence. Now that the tables have turned, their progenitor states are behaving like the proverbial bad losers by complaining that oil producers should not enjoy the privileges of their natural endowment.